Tuesday was stochastics day for me, but before\nI start talking about papers let me talk about the conference as a whole. My technical area of interest \u2013 stochastics \u2013\nis a cross-cutting technology, meaning that papers on this topic can be found\nin almost every conference at the Advanced Lithography Symposium. That is great, but it is also problematic\nwhen two or more papers on this same topic are being presented simultaneously\nin different conferences. Last year I\npushed for better coordination among conferences for cross-cutting technologies\nand the conference organizers listened! \nThey came up with a really good solution: define three cross-cutting technologies\n(stochastics, overlay, and machine learning), assign various papers in various\nconferences to these technologies as appropriate, then create \u201ctracks\u201d\n(sessions within various conferences with no overlap). It is working great! Of course, it is not perfect, but the number\nof conflicts for me so far have been far reduced. Kudos to Will Conley and the rest of the\nconference organizers for making this happen. \nI certainly hope it will be a permanent feature of future symposia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The two morning stochastics sessions in the EUV\nconference were great. There was a nice\ncombination of theoretical studies and experimental work, with both wafer\nprinting studies and more fundamental measurements. The industry is (finally) putting serious\nscientific attention to this fundamental problem, including the announcement of\nimec\u2019s new AttoLab facility to probe the fundamental mechanisms of EUV resist\nexposure. Peter Di Bisschop\u2019s paper\n(delivered expertly by Eric Hendrix) added more depth to his important stochastic\ndefect studies. Anuja De Silva of IBM\nalso gave a talk full of interesting results. \nI liked her decision to use a 30 nm pitch as a \u201ccanary in the coal mine\u201d,\nan easy way to make stochastic defects and thus to try out ideas for reducing\nthem. Steven Grzeskowiak of SUNY CNSE used\nflood exposure of resist with 80eV electrons as a model for EUV exposures \u2013 a nice\napproach. Roberto Fallica of imec showed off some great fundamental studies (as\nhe always does), this time using photoelectron spectroscopy. I was intrigued by Mark Maslow\u2019s idea of\ncorrelating stochastic defects with what he called \u201cTail CD\u201d, mean plus three\nsigma, rather than mean CD. It is a\nsimple idea (after you have thought of it!) that seems to have value. It is on my list of things to investigate\ncarefully when I get back to the office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the afternoon I stayed on the stochastics\ntrack as it switched to the metrology conference. I gave a talk about taking the SEM out of SEM\nmeasurements, and heard several other good talks on roughness metrology. A full day of nothing but roughness and\nstochastics \u2013 just about heaven for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The evening ended with the all-conference panel\ndiscussion. Regular readers of these\nconference diaries will know that I sometimes (OK, almost always) complain\nabout panels being boring. There are\nthree things that make a panel boring: a\ntopic that is too narrow, a topic that is not controversial, and\npowerpoint. Especially powerpoint. So when Will Conley (Symposium Chair) asked Harry\nLevinson and I to put a panel together, we knew what we had to do. We agreed on an all-conference panel with a\nmajor theme (Is this the end of scaling?). \nWe decided to use questions that might elicit some controversy, and then\ntried to make it fun so that it would be interesting. Here are those questions<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1) The technology for which conference at this\nSymposium is most responsible for bringing about this end of scaling?
\n2) How is the technology of your conference saving Moore\u2019s Law?
\n3) If lithographically-driven scaling does come to an end, what topics will you\nlist in your conference\u2019s call for papers?
\n4) How will we redefine the meaning of Moore’s Law in order to keep its spirit\nalive?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finally, we refused to let any panelist get\neven near powerpoint. And it worked! We started out with 400 people in the room,\nand a majority of them stayed through the biggest part of the time. I\u2019d be interested in getting more feedback,\nbut the comments so far have all been positive. \nThanks to our great panelists for making it work so well:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tony Yen (EUV Lithography)
\nJohn Petersen (Optical Microlithography)
\nRob Aitken (Design-Process-Technology Co-optimization)
\nRyan Callahan (Patterning Materials)
\nRich Wise (Etch Technology)
\nErik Hosler (Novel Patterning Technologies)
\nPhillipe Leray (Metrology, Inspection and Process Control)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We agreed to disagree on almost every point,\nexcept that progress in lithography and patterning will require cooperation by\nus all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tuesday was stochastics day for me, but before I start talking about papers let me talk about the conference as a whole. My technical area of interest \u2013 stochastics \u2013 is a cross-cutting technology, meaning that papers on this topic can be found in almost every conference at the Advanced Lithography Symposium. That is great, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=584"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":585,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions\/585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}